Emmanuel Villaume is a big man with a personality to match. The 49-year-old Frenchman, who makes his debut this week as the Dallas Opera’s new music director, is outgoing, ebullient, smart and thoughtful. He has a rare gift of making a new acquaintance feel like an old friend.

Add a résumé including conducting at the Metropolitan Opera, Covent Garden, Bastille Opera and La Fenice, and you’ll know why he attracted attention as a successor to Graeme Jenkins, who stepped down last season after two decades with the company.

Starting Friday, Villaume (pronounced vee-yohm) conducts six performances of Carmen at the Winspear Opera House. Portraying the opera’s seductive but doomed Gypsy is French mezzo Clémentine Margaine, in her American debut, with Brandon Jovanovich and Bruno Ribeiro each singing three performances as Don José, Mary Dunleavy as Micaëla and Dwayne Croft as Escamillo.

Optional “First Night” festivities include a black-tie reception and dinner beforehand and a post-performance party. A free big-screen simulcast will also be projected in Klyde Warren Park.

“People have been unbelievably welcoming,” Villaume says, in accented but fluent English, over lunch in a Dallas Opera office. “I right away got taken by the energy of the city, the lack of pretension — with, at the same time, an ability to embrace large visions, ambitious visions. That’s a very appealing combination.”

In addition to a busy schedule of rehearsals, Villaume has been meeting board members and patrons — and doubtless charming them all.

“They’re really keen to have me engage with the community,” he says, “and this is something I really want to do. You can’t think about your artistic programming, style and gesture without knowing the city — the people on the board, but also the other different actors in the community. It’s the reconnaissance phase. It’s fun, but it’s a lot of lunches and dinners.”

This Carmen is actually Villaume’s third gig with the Dallas Opera, after Faust in 1998 and Marriage of Figaro in 2002. He has also conducted productions for Lyric Opera of Chicago and San Francisco Opera, and from 2001 to 2010 was music director of the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, S.C.

Still, before settling on Villaume, Dallas Opera general director-CEO Keith Cerny and artistic director Jonathan Pell checked him out in performances in Chicago, Frankfurt and Prague.

“In every situation, he was obviously well-regarded by the players, the administration, the singers,” Pell says. “He was incredibly charming with donors. Just the way he dealt with people all around was very impressive.”

Villaume grew up in Strasbourg, on the border with Germany. As a boy, he sang in the cathedral choir, which was also the children’s chorus for the local opera company. Appearing onstage for a production of Turandot was a revelation.

“All of a sudden, all those feelings — all those incredible movements of music, passion, expression, the theatricality of things — just struck me,” he recalls. “All these things that I thought I had to repress in me, not only were they possible to express here, they were noble, they were anchored.”

At the Strasbourg Conservatory, Villaume studied cello, piano accompaniment and, of all things, tuba, but he was more interested in composition, music theory and counterpoint. Continuing his education at the Sorbonne, in Paris, he had a double concentration in philosophy and musicology.

Returning to Strasbourg, Villaume did various jobs for the Opéra du Rhin, and he mentioned his interest in conducting, which he’d never actually studied, to conductor Spiros Argiris, then working there. Argiris took him on as an assistant.

Argiris was music director of the Spoleto Festivals in both Italy and Charleston, and Villaume got his big break conducting part of a Charleston run of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. He began to get “little jobs” elsewhere and became assistant to Seiji Ozawa at the Paris Opera.

“This was the best possible school,” Villaume says, “to work with these extremely gifted conductors who needed an assistant with whom they could interact, and who were eager to pass along their knowledge — technical, artistic knowledge — to a young aspiring conductor.”

Villaume succeeded Argiris as music director of the Spoleto Festival USA. Today, he has a busy guest-conducting career — this season including engagements at the Met, Covent Garden, La Fenice in Venice and Rome Opera. Keen to balance opera and orchestral conducting, he’s also principal conductor of the National Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra in Bratislava, Slovakia.

Because of existing commitments, Villaume is conducting only Carmen here this season, but he expects to lead two or three productions in future seasons. In addition to rehearsing and conducting the orchestra, he’ll collaborate with Cerny and Pell on planning repertory and picking singers and guest conductors and help with outreach to the community.

“I think everything is in place for a strong renewal of the company,” he says. “The challenge is to capitalize on all this — balancing the repertoire, pushing the repertoire without losing the audience, bringing all the talents that are around to their maximum.”

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About Scott Cantrell

Also writing occasionally about art and architecture, Scott came to The News in 1999, after 10 years at the Kansas City Star and previous positions at newspapers in Albany and Rochester, N.Y. A former president of the Music Critics Association of North America and two-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor award for music journalism, he has also written for The New York Times, Encyclopaedia Britannica, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and magazines including Gramophone, BBC Music, Opera, Opera News and Symphony Magazine. He has performed as an organist and choral conductor and taught music history at the State University of New York at Albany. He enjoys eating all too much, his tastes ranging from barbecue, collard greens and fried okra to French cuisine and fiery Indian food.